MMA gyms abide by many unwritten rules, and Cummins may have broken a big one

(A condensed version of this story first appeared in Friday’s USA TODAY.)

When it comes to the unwritten rules of the training that mixed martial arts fighters put each other through behind closed doors, UFC lightweight and MMA veteran Yves Edwards has a simple way of looking at it.

“The gym is like Vegas,” Edwards told MMAjunkie. “What happens in there should stay in there.”

Call it an unofficial code that MMA fighters expect one another to abide by. And, for the most part, they stick to it.

But every once in a while, as in the case of UFC heavyweights Daniel Cormier (13-0 MMA, 2-0 UFC) and Patrick Cummins (4-0, 0-0), the rules get broken. That’s when a breach of etiquette can result in serious bad blood, which is what many are expecting once Cormier gets in the cage with the heavy underdog Cummins at UFC 170 in Las Vegas on Saturday night (Feb. 22, 10 pm, pay-per-view).

It was never supposed to happen like this. Cormier was initially slated to take on former UFC light heavyweight champ Rashad Evans in the co-main event. When Evans withdrew with a knee injury just a little over a week before the fight, the UFC scrambled to find a replacement. Cummins was quick to volunteer, using his history as one of Cormier’s Olympic wrestling training partners to bolster his case.

On one particularly rough day of training, Cummins claimed, he’d even tossed Cormier around until he broke down in tears. It’s a story Cormier didn’t exactly dispute, though he did add some context when the two fighters appeared on a “FOX Sports Live” segment recently.

“I was getting ready for the Olympics,” Cormier said. “Pat’s never been ‘the guy.’ I was ‘the guy.’ So it wasn’t just Pat Cummins who was wrestling me. It was Pat Cummins and everybody else coming in wrestling me. I was also going through a lot of personal things at the time.”

Around the time Cormier was delivering this explanation, Cummins turned to the show’s host and pretended to cry.

It might make for good theater, but it didn’t win over many in the MMA sphere who saw it as a violation of an important training room code.

“I’ve seen every one of our athletes at his highest high and lowest low,” said former kickboxer and noted MMA trainer Duke Roufus. “Everyone has bad days. Everyone’s been brought to tears, been distraught, been crushed in that room. That’s what that room is there for. That’s the safety net.”

It’s the kind of thing fans might not think about often, these rules of etiquette and unofficial codes of conduct that govern a fight gym. To the average viewer of a UFC pay-per-view, these people just show up on fight night fully prepared, game faces securely fastened.

But while the fight itself may be an individual endeavor, preparation is a team sport. It’s the behind-the-scenes rules that hold these teams of individualistic glory-seekers together. Without them, as trainer Greg Jackson pointed out, things can get unpleasant in a hurry.

“One that we’ve had problems with, and only with certain individuals, is that when the camera crews come, you take care of the guy they’re there to film,” said Jackson.

You can imagine how this happens. The UFC sends a camera crew down to capture some B-roll footage of a fighter sparring in preparation for his big night. Maybe that’s when his training partner decides that, hey, if he were to really take it to this guy right now, viewers might come away from the pre-fight hype show wanting to know more about him.

“Which of course never happens,” Jackson said. “But fighters are attention whores – some of them, not all of them. They get in weird places in their heads sometimes.”

To make it easier on everyone, Jackson spelled it out: Don’t be a hero when the cameras come around.

That’s just one of the little rules that helps keep the Jackson-Winkeljohn gym running smoothly. Then there’s his take on romantic entanglements between teammates – a real potential pitfall when you have a team with so many top male and female fighters.

“We deal with that pretty much upfront, because it doesn’t just become their problem,” Jackson said. “And they always break up. Take two of the most unstable people in the world who have to fight in front of other people for happiness, and yeah, that’s going to be the relationship that lasts. Then it becomes my problem.”

With his male fighters, Jackson said, “I tell them, ‘There are plenty of women on this planet. You’re a fighter, this alpha male, everybody wants to be you. Go find a girl outside the gym. You can do it.’”

If these sound like pointless or futile restrictions, remember that Jackson’s been at this for roughly two decades. A lot of his rules spring from hard-won wisdom, like the lessons he learned when a rift developed between current UFC light heavyweight champion Jon Jones and then-teammate Rashad Evans.

At first, Jackson said, the team policy was that they would never fight each other, even with a UFC title on the line.

“Then reality set in,” Jackson said. “A team of our size, we’ve got a couple top contenders in almost every weight class. That’s the reality. They might end up having to fight. If they do, we have protocols in place now. With the Rashad and Jon Jones thing, I was just like, ah, it’ll never happen. I made mistakes in that. It won’t happen twice.”

That’s not so different from how Roufus runs his Roufusport squad in Milwaukee. His approach to team-building is inspired by what he saw when training at Muay Thai gyms in Thailand, he said.

“The teams in Thailand, they live in the gym like a small family,” said Roufus. “I think our team is a very family-oriented type of environment.”

Of course, a lot of people say that about their MMA gyms. The way Roufus sees it, you have to create the right environment in order to make it work. That’s why not bragging about who you beat up in training is so important, he said. Fighters need to have the freedom to fail in training. It’s the only way for them to feel comfortable enough to try new things that will help them grow and evolve.

“If you’re really good, you’re trying to get better,” Roufus said. “And of course I’m not going to be great at a technique I just learned that I’m still trying out. I try and teach that so guys won’t be afraid to experiment with new stuff and get better. You have to be in that comfort zone to do that. It’s OK to fail in practice. I want to have all the fighters I train to have that environment where they can fail in the room and not have to worry about being criticized for it. The only thing that counts is when you’re under the lights.”

But for some fighters, there isn’t just one gym that they call home. Take the aforementioned Edwards, who often splits time between Florida, Texas, and California. When you travel around that much, he said, you’re bound to have friends in different gyms who end up fighting each other. It happened to him when his friend Jason High fought his other friend Todd Moore in a Strikeforce bout in 2011.

“Internally you kind of have an idea who will win the fight, and I’m honest with my friends,” Edwards said. “I might tell him, ‘This is where he has an advantage over you.’ But I won’t give him a specific scouting report. I saw them both during that training camp, but I wouldn’t say, ‘He’s really susceptible to this,’ or ‘I get him all the time with that.’”

After all, Edwards said, you wouldn’t want a training partner sharing that sort of insider information about you with a future opponent. And that, said Jackson, is essentially what it all boils down to in a situation like the one involving Cummins and Cormier.

“I like Pat,” Jackson said. “I know him well and he’s a sweet guy. But it’s about treating people the way you want to be treated. Everybody has weak moments in training. It’s training. You’ll have terrible days when you just get owned. One of the things we make a big deal of in my school is, you don’t go on the internet and say, ‘I just owned so-and-so today.’ It’s training. It doesn’t matter. You have great days and terrible days, and that’s just how it goes.”

When it comes to Cummins’ transgression, he can at least fall back on the fact that he and Cormier aren’t teammates. They were training partners for wrestling, nothing more, and so maybe you could argue that the same codes don’t apply. In an interview with MMAjunkie he insisted that his training room tale was “not fabricated at all,” but also acknowledged that his decision to trot it out now had as much to do with self-promotion as psychological warfare.

“I think that’s the way to sell the fight,” Cummins said. “Everyone needs something to anchor on to make this fight make sense.”

He might have a point there, and certainly his sob story has made plenty of headlines. But as Edwards pointed out, it might not make much of a difference in the end.

“I completely get that it’s an opportunity, it’s a big shot,” Edwards said. “But that happened in the room. It might help your confidence, but it doesn’t mean anything on fight night.”

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